20 years since 'Gladiator' the movie

Daily Mail ^ | 14 May 2020 | TOM LEONARD IN NEW YORK

[C19fan]

I remember that movie. Has a star studded cast of course Sophia Loren, James Mason, Alec Guinness and Christopher Plummer.

[ops33]

Lead slugs fired from slings are called bullets.

[Rockingham]

It may be anachronistic, but I have read experts who have referred to slingshot projectiles as “bullets.”

[Rennes Templar]

That turtle formation, isn’t that what the gladiators used in the first coliseum fight?

[Rockingham]

Thanks for the article. With high stakes, often insane schedule and production issues, and combustible egos in tension, movie-making is always a fraught business. Yet good, even great movies get made as a matter of routine, intermittently skirting disaster like the plucky hero in a Harold Lloyd comedy on the path to success.

Ridley Scott has a well-deserved reputation for mastering troubled productions: Alien, Bladerunner, Gladiator, and others became successful, even great movies in spite of themselves. Scott began in advertising and became a well-regarded and highly disciplined director of TV commercials before being drawn into movie-making. He is one of the best at stitching the pieces of a badly broken production into a bankable finished product.

Yet even Scott must have hit the ceiling when he learned that Oliver Reed had broken his promise and gone on a final bender. In old Hollywood, run by thuggish, clever, determined producers, a reliable actor friend would have been assigned to Reed as a keeper, backed by studio muscle and draconian contract terms. These days, the Screen Actors Guild prohibits anything like that, so Reed got the freedom to drink himself to death and leave his final scene to CGI. I am sure that even Reed, if sober, would also regret the loss.

[pabianice]

Testudo.